"He feels so bad about the families and the girls," said Shirley Bright, who visited her son at the Tazewell County Jail last Saturday.

She said she still cannot believe the slayings occurred at the hands of her son - at least, not the son she knows.

"That wasn't my son," Shirley Bright, 60, said through sobs. "It was an evil monster. My son wasn't like this.

"I think (the cause) was the drugs and painkillers he was taking."

Larry Bright, 38, is charged with the 2003 first-degree murder of Linda Neal, 40, of Peoria. He further has implicated himself in the slayings of seven other women, some of whom had histories of prostitution and/or drug abuse.

Some of those bodies have yet to be recovered. Some he dumped in rural areas in Peoria and Tazewell counties. Others he incinerated in his back yard at 3418 W. Starr Court.

His mother owns that property, which sits in a cul-de-sac in a residential area in Limestone Township. She lives in a modest but tidy ranch house, while he stayed in a tiny guest house out back.

Shirley Bright said she rarely went into her son's home. It was too messy.

"I'm a very neat housekeeper. He was not," she said. "And we got into arguments about his housekeeping."

Otherwise, though, they got along well.

"We always had yard work," she said. "We had a beautiful yard and a beautiful pond. We would sit and watch the fish."

She said she saw no signs - in the yard or in her son - that he was burning and burying body parts in the yard.

"Whenever I'd come home from work, he'd meet me with a hug and say, 'What are we going to do tonight? And what are we going to do for supper?' "

Sometimes, though, she would go away at night to visit a boyfriend in Woodford County. So she was not always privy to his nighttime activities.

She blames drugs for slowly changing her son into a killer.

In 1972, she separated from her husband, Garry Bright, because of his abuse of alcohol and marijuana, she said. She filed for divorce in 1981 in Tazewell County on the grounds of "extreme and repeated mental cruelty."

She said Garry Bright pretty much vanished from Larry's life until their son grew toward adulthood. Then, wanting a "buddy," he started visiting Larry and introduced him to marijuana, she said.

In 1983, at age 17, Larry Bright was arrested for vehicle and residential burglaries. He served a three-year prison sentence.

He later worked in construction. But several years ago, he severely hurt his back, necessitating two operations for disc damage, his mother said. Afterward, he took Vicodin and other painkillers for a long time.

Page 2 of 2 - "He was in pain all the time," she says.

His father died of cancer in 1998. Relatives have said that Larry Bright turned to alcohol and cocaine to ease that loss.

However, his mother said she saw no indication that her son had started taking illicit drugs. Since his arrest, however, she has come to believe that he was a habitual user of crack cocaine.

She visited her son last Saturday for the allotted 30 minutes at the Tazewell County Jail. He conveyed a sense of remorse for the killings, but did not reveal what prompted his murder spree - other than mentioning "those drugs."

Shirley Bright did not press him for a motive, as she has had a hard time taking in so much shocking information about her son. Since his confession, she has suffered chest pains, which on one occasion got bad enough to prompt an emergency room visit.

"I have been trying to deal with this," she said, crying. "I haven't been able to ask him a lot of questions."

Still, though her son is white and the victims were black, she does not think the killings were racially motivated. Further, she said she knows that he had dated at least one black woman.

Though police are finishing with their probing of the Starr Court property, Shirley Bright has no immediate plans to go back. For two months, she has been staying at a friend's home outside Peoria. She said she is afraid to return home, for fear of retribution directed at her.

She says she recognizes the anger and anguish experienced by the victims' survivors.

"Larry's family has each and every one of you in their thoughts and prayers," she said. "Our hearts go out for you. We have such deep, deep sorrow for what happened."

PHIL LUCIANO is a columnist with the Journal Star. He can be reached at pluciano@pjstar.com, 686-3155 or (800) 225-5757, Ext. 3155.